On Thursday, Amazon, the online retail giant, announced that, contrary to analysts’ predictions and after months of financial losses, it had turned a profit in the second quarter.

The stock market responded with euphoria. Amazon’s share price surged by 18 percent in a single day, adding $40 billion to the company’s market capitalization. With 154,000 employees, Amazon overnight became the world’s largest retailer by market capitalization, surpassing Wal-Mart, with 2.2 million employees.

The market response was conditioned by the fact that stocks have been registering significant losses in the US in the past week, with earnings reports of major companies falling short of expectations amidst growing signs of slump in the United States and internationally.

These include a continuing sharp fall in the prices of commodities such as oil and iron ore, along with declining growth rates in China and a number of emerging markets, and ongoing stagnation in Europe. The International Monetary Fund earlier this month predicted the worst year for global growth since 2009, and last week the US Federal Reserve Board, in its semiannual Monetary Policy Report, painted a grim picture of the state of the US economy.

The signs are mounting—the stock panic in China, extreme volatility on US markets—that the disconnect between a stagnant real economy and a booming stock market, which has prevailed in the US since the beginning of the stock market recovery in the spring of 2009, may well be setting the stage for a new financial meltdown even greater than that of 2008.

In the meantime, multibillionaires such as Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos continue to milk the economy. For Bezos, Thursday’s trading was, to put it mildly, lucrative. He made $7 billion in 45 minutes.

Now the seventh-richest man in the world, Bezos saw his wealth surge to $43 billion. For all the hype surrounding the company he founded 20 years ago, Bezos got his billions by sweating his workers, monopolizing the market and capitalizing on a decades-long financial bubble.

Employees in Amazon’s fulfillment centers are paid $11-12 per hour. They are subject to grueling and humiliating conditions. They are regularly searched and foremen record how many times they use the restroom.

A 2011 report in a Pennsylvania newspaper noted that the company would not open the doors to ventilate one of its warehouses even when temperatures reached 110 degrees, for fear of theft. When workers started passing out, the company stationed ambulances outside for them.

Amazon now accounts for a bigger share of online sales than the next dozen competitors. It has used its enormous market power to strong-arm small publishers and authors, recently announcing unilaterally that it will start paying authors of e-books by the page view, instead of by the download, resulting in sharply reduced commissions. Bezos purchased the Washington Post with $250 million of his personal funds in 2013.

It is worth making some comparisons. The amount of money Bezos made Thursday is:

* Equivalent to what 300,000 US workers earning the median income earn in an entire year.

* More than two-thirds of the annual funding of America’s free and reduced-price school lunch program.

* Enough to provide every one of America’s 15.8 million hungry children $450 per year in food assistance.

The accumulation of such personal wealth amid the vast social misery that prevails in the United States can only be called obscene. But such an assessment would be news to the US media, which salutes every milestone hit by the Dow or NASDAQ with rapture and depicts the members of America’s billionaire oligarchy as geniuses and innovators.

There is something deeply dysfunctional about an economic system in which the announcement of a $92 million profit—the first-ever quarterly profit reported by Amazon—triggers $40 billion in share purchases in a matter of minutes.

The continual diversion of vast amounts of money into the stock market is a symptom of an underlying economic crisis of immense proportions. Every dollar that goes into speculating on a stock like Amazon, with a price-to-earnings ratio of nearly 1,000, is a dollar not used for productive investment.

While the real economy in the US has grown by only 13 percent since the depth of the recession in 2009, all three major American stock indexes have more than tripled. This year, NASDAQ for the first time surpassed the heights it reached just before the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000.

Meanwhile, the US economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. The falloff in economic activity was led by a collapse in business fixed investment, which fell by 2 percent. Investment in nonresidential structures fell by 18 percent.

The sharp fall in investment came despite the fact that US corporations are hoarding some $1.4 trillion in cash and similar assets, the largest such figure on record, amassed as a result of years of record profits amid falling wages and an influx of cheap money from the world’s central banks.

Instead of using this cash to hire workers and build factories, corporations are diverting it to raise dividends, buy back shares, hike executive pay and carry out mergers and acquisitions, all at record levels. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that major US corporations in 2013 spent 36 percent of their operating cash to buy back their own shares, more than double the rate a decade before.

This speculative frenzy has been driven by six years of near-zero interest rates and money printing by the Federal Reserve, whose policies underlie the enormous overvaluation of companies such as Amazon.

The performance of the US stock market has decoupled from economic growth to such an extent that any indication of genuine recovery in the real economy generally prompts a market sell-off, while signs of economic slump tend to send the markets higher.

This state of affairs is an expression of the crisis and decline of American capitalism, which has for nearly four decades responded to declining profit margins in manufacturing by turning ever more decisively to financial parasitism.

The US ruling class and the capitalist system over which it presides have no answers to the social crisis in America. For every problem, they have the same solution: impoverish workers and use the money to gamble on the stock market. If workers don’t like it, there are always the police to keep them in line.

Human Rights Watch is accusing the Saudi Arabia-led coalition of dropping banned cluster bombs manufactured and supplied by the U.S. on civilian areas in Yemen. Cluster bombs contain dozens or even hundreds of smaller munitions designed to fan out over a wide area, often the size of a football field. They are banned under a 2008 treaty for the high civilian toll they can cause. The treaty was adopted by 116 countries — although not by Saudi Arabia, Yemen or the United States. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S.-supplied cluster bombs have landed near rebel-held villages in northern Yemen, putting residents in danger. On Monday, the State Department said it is “looking into” the report’s allegations, adding it takes “all accounts of civilian deaths in the ongoing hostilities in Yemen very seriously.” We are joined by Stephen Goose, director of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division and chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, and Belkis Wille, Yemen and Kuwait researcher at Human Rights Watch.

ON March 25 2015 a Saudi Arabian-led coalition began bombing the Gulf state of Yemen. According to Saudi Arabia the intervention was in support of the US and Saudi-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who had been overthrown by supposedly Iranian-backed Houthi rebels allied to Hadi’s predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was also backed by the US.

The Saudi bombing campaign has been relentless and largely indiscriminate. A joint statement by 18 scholars noted that “the targets of the campaign include schools, homes, refugee camps, water systems, grain stores and food industries.” In May, CNN noted that “the Saudi Press Agency reported that the latest attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen — 130 air strikes in a 24-hour period — included the targeting of schools and hospitals.”

Back in April the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned Yemen was “on the verge of total collapse.” By June matters had got much worse, with 20 million Yemenis — nearly 80 per cent of the population — in urgent need of food, water and medical aid.

According to a superb report in the Guardian by Julian Borger it was “a humanitarian disaster that aid agencies say has been dramatically worsened by a naval blockade” imposed by the Saudi-led coalition.

“The blockade means it’s impossible to bring anything into the country,” said Oxfam’s humanitarian programme manager in the capital Sanaa. “The situation is deteriorating, hospitals are now shutting down, without diesel.”

Save the Children’s Yemen director said: “Children are dying preventable deaths in Yemen because the rate of infectious diseases is rising.” Cholera is on the rise and a dengue fever outbreak has been reported in the port city of Aden.

What has been Britain’s response to this man-made disaster? Government statements about fighting terrorism and promoting democracy and human rights lead one to expect that it would line up against Saudi Arabia.

Instead, Britain is backing the Saudis as they batter Yemen. “We’ll support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat,” Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in April. In practice, this means “political support, of course, logistical and technical support.”

This means “British-made Typhoon fighter jets scream through Yemen’s skies, flown by British-trained Saudi pilots, dropping British-made bombs on the poorest country in the region,” explained Bahrain Watch’s John Horne.

The US is also backing the attack, providing logistical and intelligence support. US planners are “using live intelligence feeds from surveillance flights over Yemen to help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

Borger notes that the brutal blockade is backed by Britain and the US. However, “Washington and London have quietly tried to persuade the Saudis … to moderate their tactics, and in particular to ease the blockade.”

What other nation responsible for such mass slaughter receives a quiet word in the ear rather than outraged public denunciations? With the UN declaring its highest-level of humanitarian emergency in Yemen earlier this month, the two countries’ gentle prodding have clearly had little effect.

The UN says 21.1 million people need aid, with 13 million desperately short of food and 9.4 million with no water.

Coupled with the likely use of British-made jets in the Saudi Arabian bombing of Yemen in 2009, Britain’s current support for Saudi aggression is part of Britain’s broader strategy in the region. “With the US keen to reduce its military presence in the Gulf, the UK is preparing to fill the gap, restoring its former links, returning to ‘East of Suez’,” Guardian defence correspondent Richard Norton-Taylor argues.

The British government is only able to get away with enabling a humanitarian crisis of this size because the media has largely failed to adequately report on the crisis in Yemen. And when the media does cover the conflict Britain’s support for the death and destruction is rarely mentioned.

Dr Florian Zollmann, a media lecturer at Liverpool Hope University, has found a number of other disturbing patterns.

Analysing how the US and British press reports the conflict in Yemen, Zollmann notes that “the Anglo-American news media has largely failed to investigate the legality of the intervention” or the fact “Saudi Arabia hardly constitutes a benevolent and stabilising force.”

Faced with a de facto media blackout of the role of Britain and US in the Saudi attack on Yemen, it is important progressives who are aware of the reality shout about it as loudly as possible. Ultimately it is only public pressure that can halt British support for the bombing and push the government to urge the UN security council to demand an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to resolve the conflict.

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press. He tweets @IanJSinclair.

King Charles II believed in the divine right of kings. Oliver Cromwell and his elected parliament chopped off the king’s head. Bourgeois historians call it the English civil war, but the epic battle between Parliament and the Crown was in fact the English revolution.

In 1872 Karl Marx described what he saw in the British countryside as the “great awakening” of British agricultural workers.

It was in that year that Joseph Arch founded the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union under the chestnut tree on the village green in Wellesbourne, Warwickshire.

Arch’s supporters hoped for an attendance of perhaps 30. In fact over 2,000 agricultural labourers arrived to hear Arch speak and to join his union.

Country women

In two world wars women have taken jobs previously considered men’s work. The Women’s Land Army worked on farms and market gardens to feed the nation.

The Lumber Jills managed our forests and produced timber for building and strategic items like pit props. Women also worked narrow boats on the canals carrying loads through the countryside.

Harvest workers

In the 1930s the world economic slump put more pressure on agricultural workers and farmers. The Church of England was still enforcing the tithe system, taking 10 per cent of the harvest in many parts of the country. After a huge fight, these iniquitous ancient tithe laws were abolished.

In August 1923 between 50 and 60 boat families gathered at Braunston, Northamptonshire, blocking the canal. They were on strike to stop canal employers slashing wages. The strike, to fight the wage cuts and for the right to join a union, was to last 14 weeks.

It was one of the first strikes organised by the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), which had only been formed the year before. Today the TGWU and the Union of Agricultural Workers that can trace its history back to Joseph Arch are both part of Unite.

In Cromwell’s New Model Army, new ideas and arguments were being thrashed out. Ordinary soldiers debated radical ideas like agrarian socialism and electing their own officers. Groups like the Levellers would fight, and some even die fighting for democracy in Cromwell’s army. Three Levellers were shot in front of other imprisoned Levellers in Burford Churchyard in the Cotswolds.

The Diggers, an English revolution dissident group, wanted to establish a kind of primitive communism inspired by Biblical texts. They quoted John Ball: “Things will not go well in England until all things are held in common.”

Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, marching from Canterbury to London to protest against the poll tax. The peasants also demanded universal freedom. During negotiations at London’s Smithfield, the deceitful King Richard II had Tyler murdered.

Rebel priest John Ball was another leader of the revolt. He believed that all humans should be treated equally. “When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” he preached.

THIS weekend we are celebrating the heroic farm workers of west Dorset, who, in 1834, famously formed a trade union.

They did nothing wrong but that didn’t stop six leaders of the union being arrested and transported. Today we still remember and celebrate those brave Tolpuddle Martyrs but the names of the farm owners and judges who sentenced them are long-forgotten.

However our new majority Tory government has lost no time in attacking trade union rights.

Captain Swing

Rich farmers have always used mechanisation, not to improve the lot of agricultural workers but to reduce costs. In 1830 rural workers sought to protect their jobs in the Captain Swing riots over the introduction of new threshing machines.

Allotments are concreted over by developers. Huge global multinational agribusinesses dominate food production with genetically modified crops and toxic chemicals.

Careless husbandry brings disease and invasive species. Rapacious supermarkets blackmail food suppliers. Children are ignorant about the origins of the food on their plates.

The co-op group, once Britain’s biggest and best farmers, have sold up to prop up the disaster caused by dodgy bankers. All over the land, the countryside is subject to rape and pillage.

The struggle goes on. One of the most important is the constant campaign for a living wage and affordable secure housing for farm workers. The spirit of Tolpuddle lives on in this fight. The other battle is to protect a sustainable environment.

Women in Britain today are fed up and that really isn’t good news for the government. The economy is declining, yet the cost of living is rising. And it’s women who are feeling the pinch become tighter and tighter in the rise in household bills, food prices, and increases for those that use public transport and petrol for those that drive: here.

The Colombian trade union leader Huber Ballesteros was arrested by Colombian police days before he was due to address the 2013 TUC conference in Bournemouth.

Justice for Colombia managed to obtain a video message from Huber smuggled out from inside the prison and played to the TUC congress.

The Colombian government continues to imprison trade unionists and human rights activists.

There are more than 7,500 political prisoners in Colombia. Justice for Colombia, with the support of the British trade union movement, campaigns for the release of all Colombia’s political prisoners.

After the recent blog posts here which saved November 2011-December 2011 posts at my blog.co.uk blog which will disappear, now a post about today, 15 July 2015. There will be more November 2011-December 2011 posts in between new ones.

Despite government violence, opposition groups have pressed ahead with peace talks and the Farc has called a unilateral ceasefire from July 20.

Mr Burgon said ministers should urge Bogota to “agree a bilateral ceasefire as soon as possible to create the necessary conditions for successful outcome to the talks and reduce the human cost and suffering of the population.”

Tory Foreign Minister Hugo Swire said he had raised rights violations with his Colombian counterpart at a summit in Brussels last month.

Angus Robertson, the SNP’s leader at Westminster, has put out a statement about the government’s decision to pull the vote on hunting. He says this is the fourth issue on which the SNP has forced the government to back down.

“This is the fourth issue where the SNP group have led the opposition in forcing the Tories into backing down – stopping the EU referendum being on the same day as the Scottish parliament election, getting any moves to repeal the Human Rights Act kicked into the long grass, the debacle of the government having to abandon last week’s vote on English Votes for English Laws, and now stopping this week’s vote to relax the fox hunting ban in England and Wales.

This is another powerful reminder of just how fragile the Tories’ majority is – on these four issues it was non-existent, they were staring defeat in the face, and there will be more such issues.”

He also urged the government to talk to the SNP about English votes for English laws.

“And on the issue of Evel, the UK government should respond positively to the First Minister’s letter and agree to sensible discussions on the basis of mutual respect – rather than laying down the law to make Scotland’s representation at Westminster second class.”

And he urged Labour to vote with the SNP against the welfare bill next week.

Crime and poverty are two key themes in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Referencing Dickens’s original manuscripts, Professor John Bowen explains how Dickens used crime to excite the reader as well as provide a moralising tale of criminality.

One of the most spectacular essays – an attack on a complacent establishment that could tolerate the appalling state of poor relief – had previously been attributed to one Joseph Parkinson, and presumed to be only a commission from the great man of letters. But from the newly studied margin notes, it now seems that Dickens not only supplied the idea but was chief author of the polemic. Below, we publish the piece – originally entitled ‘What Is Sensational?’ – which remains a great example of passionate reporting; still relevant, still an inspiration to anyone who sees their role as giving a voice to those who cannot be heard.

The essay came after a number of scandals involving conditions in the workhouses hit the headlines during the 1860s. It uses a series of rhetorical questions to highlight the abuse of the poor and the failures of those found wanting in their duty of care. The title plays on the then current vogue for ‘sensational’ literature, most notably exemplified by Mrs Braddon and Wilkie Collins. For Dickens it is not fiction that is sensational but the appalling facts about how the poor were neglected and mistreated.

In his opening argument Dickens addresses Gathorne Hardy, then President of the Poor Law Board, who argued that the press has sensationalised the deaths of two paupers – Timothy Daly and Richard Gibson – “murdered” by the gross neglect they suffered in workhouse hospitals in 1864 and 1865. The incidents caused a national outcry, and led to a campaign by Florence Nightingale for a major upheaval of the workhouse nursing system.

By 1867, Gathorne Hardy would be drafting a new poor law bill to remedy the situation in London’s workhouses, leading to the creation of separate hospitals and a fund to finance the costs of all drugs, medical appliances and the salaries of all poor relief officers.

What Is Sensational?

By Charles Dickens

The Right Honourable Mr Gathorne Hardy, the President of the Poor Law Board, has a grievance. The newspapers have, he says, written “sensationally” upon workhouse mismanagement, and an interest “wholly disproportionate to the circumstances” has been roused in the public mind. Further, lest any public writer should misunderstand his meaning, he is kind enough to particularise the cases to which sensation writing has been applied.

These were the condition of the Strand Union workhouse, and the deaths of the paupers Daly and Gibson. It is a noble and instructive sight to look down upon from our snug perch in the House of Commons while this genial remark is made. Opposition and government benches both full; legislators smugly quiet, attentive, and approving; while our orator, who is tediously fluent, well dressed, and self-complacent, pours forth his shameless aspersions against those who have borne disinterested testimony to the truth. Paid by the public to protect the Poor, the official representative of a costly system under which paupers starve and die can find nothing more germane to the subject of poor law reform than abuse of those who have performed the real work of his department, and but for whom, it and its salaried servants, parasites, and admirers would have continued with folded hands and brazen front to murmur, “All is well.” During the celebrated Chelsea inquiry into Crimean mismanagement, a true humorist and draughtsman, now no more, gave us a sketch of “The witness who ought to have been examined”, in the shape of the skeleton of one of the hundreds of horses dead of starvation.

But that the heartless perversity which can sneer at human suffering as sensational would not be convinced though one rose from the dead, we might well wish that the two murdered paupers, Daly and Gibson, could be brought from their graves to bear testimony against their accuser and his accomplices. Mr Hardy proclaims himself an accessory after the fact by his audacious attack on witnesses not to be suborned, and he is himself criminal in his miserable palliation of crime. “Wholly disproportionate to the circumstances,” smiles this Christian statesman, with a propitiatory wave of the hand; while well clad, well fed, clean, comfortable, prosperous legislators smile back assent, and no man says them nay.

Yet professional philanthropists, platform orators, great religious lights, men well known at Exeter Hall, and without whose names no charitable subscription-list is complete, can be seen from our point of observation here, placidly beating time to Mr Hardy’s verbose cadences, and murmuring to each other afterwards that his performance has been very creditable indeed.

The tu quoque line of argument is to be deprecated, but the daring of the arch-mediocrity below us suggests the question, what would a sensation[al] poor law president be like ? Suppose a man to succeed to office when public opinion has insisted upon reform; suppose a prime minister to herald him with a bombastic flourish as “the fittest man in the Queen’s dominions” for his onerous charge; suppose the man himself to assure the House of Commons that all previous abuses have been due to the mismanagement and indifference of his predecessor; suppose the same man to purchase the cheap cheers of his fellow- legislators by braggart promises of efficient control and personal sacrifice; and suppose him to conveniently ignore his own statements, and, while filching the labours of others, to throw stones at them from the convenient shelter of parliamentary place — would this be sensational?

Suppose the nation to be so outraged by the abuses and cruelties tacitly sanctioned by one notorious department and its officers, that some show of justice and humanity to paupers is found necessary to prolong the life of an unpopular ministry — is the use of charity and decency as political counters, sensational? Suppose a servant of the State to be bold as a lion in his pledges to the public, and as meek as a sucking dove in his performances with guardians; suppose him to be outwardly rigid and privately compromising — is this sensational? Suppose he, or an officer under his direction, to preface public investigations by private interviews with the people accused, wherein friendly hints are given how damaging evidence may be suppressed; suppose him to have other investigations conducted with closed doors, and to cause others again to be so craftily managed that the evidence is published and the verdict resolutely kept back — is this sensational? Suppose a pinchbeck popularity to be earned by the adoption of other men’s ideas and a wholesale renunciation of one’s own — is this sensational? Suppose underhand relations are endeavoured to be established between a public body and its critics, and sops to be proffered to Cerberus so deftly that a stern front and frowning brow is successfully maintained even while coaxings, fondlings, and tit-bits are being offered — is this sensational? To ally oneself with pitiful intriguers; to purchase hirelings who, having played fetch and carry to one set of masters, are ready to transfer their venal and shameful services to the highest bidder with a cheerful unscrupulousness that such light o’ loves only know — is this sensational? Is it sensational to pander, palter, truckle, and deceive; to hush up cruelty and brutality to the helpless, frauds on the ratepayers, and dishonesty to the poor? Is it sensational to bid for political support by throwing the judicial mantle over parochial misdeeds? Is it sensational to make active sympathy with suffering a matter for punishment; and selfish indifference the key to favour and reward? Is it sensational to blow hot and cold, to reprove bluffly, and cringe servilely; to degrade a Christian’s duty into a charlatan’s trick; to abet the oppressor, and use the giant’s strength against the oppressed? Which was sensational, the dynasty converting “the negation of God into a system of government” or the statesman who called down the indignation of Europe on its atrocities ? Let Mr Hardy give us benighted public writers information on such points as these.

Sensational writing in the newspapers! Why, the right honourable gentleman is surely contributing sensational writing for tomorrow’s issue by the yard. That he and the party of obstruction should eat the leek by meekly appropriating the views and arguments used by their opponents when such measures as the Houseless Poor Act and the Union Chargeability Bill were proposed and carried in their teeth; that the love of place should awaken a sense of justice; that those “carrying the bag” should have been whipped into even a semblance of caring for the poor, is surely sensational enough for common readers. It is as the public defender of the system, and the censor of those public witnesses whose evidence is not hired, rather than as the man responsible for the particular acts alluded to, that Mr Hardy stands self-accused; and such writers as respect themselves and their vocation are not likely to forget his words. Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds is not always a successful policy, and it is useful to observe how the measure introduced is a practical refutation to the charge made; how every useful clause in it can be directly traced to the influence of independent comment and suggestion; how the tacit admissions of the speaker are damnatory to the expensive sham he represents. The flippancy which would propitiate the guardian class at the expense not merely of humanity but honesty, is inexpressibly shocking; and with this before one, the bill itself, useful as many of its provisions are, seems like a bribe thrown half contemptuously to an irritated and long-suffering public, rather than a conscientiously devised remedy for flagrant abuse.

Let us accept Mr Gathorne Hardy’s challenge, and by recapitulating the facts he takes exception to, grope darkly for his definition of the word “sensational.” Selecting the workhouse he quotes as an example, what do we find its discipline and internal arrangements to have been? Carpet-beating carried on as a trade among its infirmary wards; the dust and flue settling upon the sick and dying, aggravating their sufferings and hastening their end; a broken-down potboy employed as nurse, who trembled from sheer debility when spoken to; patients unable to move in bed without assistance, and help refused them by the guardians in defiance of the entreaties of their own medical officer; the beer, wine, and spirits provided to keep body and soul together habitually stolen from the wretched patients by pauper wardsmen and nurses, an emporium for their sale, known as “the Brimstone Hotel,” flourishing within the workhouse walls; and a standing proposal to reduce the doctor’s salary brought forward whenever he made an effort for reform. These were the proved facts.

The wretched jocularities of human brutes as to mesenteric disease being “something to eat”; the ironical suggestions for “armchairs and drawing-rooms for paupers,” both occurred at the official inquiry here; and that killing consumptive paupers with carpet-dust has been discontinued, and that the nursing and discipline have been partially amended, is due, not to our Poor Law Board or its officers, but to independent inquiry and the stern comments it evoked. It fortunately happens that, since these comments were made, a return from the Poor Law Board to the House of Commons, dated “7th August, 1866,” and signed “H Fleming, Secretary,” has been obtained. Let us ask Mr Hardy, is this a sensational document? Are the following statements by Dr Rogers, the medical officer of the union which was sympathised with by the responsible head of the Poor Law Board as the object of attacks in the newspapers — are these sensational? Speaking of the Strand Union workhouse, Dr. Rogers writes: “In the first summer following my appointment, an outbreak of fever took place, owing to excessive overcrowding and deficient accommodation. . . . The ward then used for the reception of persons admitted on nightly orders, called ‘Pug’s Hole’ by the inmates, was a cellar (without area), and of the most objectionable kind, and the hotbed from which fever was largely propagated. . . . .

Having repeatedly noticed that the suckling women became consumptive, or suffered from diseases of an exhaustive character, and that many of their children died, I found, on inquiry, that the dietary of the lying-in ward (over which I had then no control, and was not supposed to enter without the request of the master or midwife) was very insufficient, as it consisted only of gruel for nine days, and that when discharged to the nursery they went at once on the common diet of the house. . . . .

In the year 1862, a severe outbreak of fever took place in the building, due solely to overcrowding ; twenty-five cases occurred in quick succession. . . . . On or about this time I suggested to the visiting committee an alteration of the dead-house, the grating etc, from which opened beneath the windows of the women’s infirm wards. . . . . From this grating foul emanations from the dead frequently arose and filled the wards, and in the summer large blue- flies flew in and out of them from the dead- house. . . . . In 1864, overcrowding having again taken place. . . . . a malignant fever broke out in the house. . . . . In May, 1865, the Poor Law Board addressed you (the Strand Union guardians) on the subject of pauper nurses, and strongly advised you to engage paid and responsible persons. . . . . you, however, engaged one, and by the terms of the advertisement limited her attendance to those patients only who were in the two sick wards, amounting to about forty persons, and yet the house contained, as you are aware by the weekly returns, four hundred sick, aged, or permanently disabled persons.” “When Belsham, the pauper nurse, was removed at my instance, for robbing the sick, the master, in consequence of a suggestion by me, undertook to bring the question forward, and applied for paid assistance, as the circumstances were such as admitted of no delay. The total refusal, as he informed me, of the visiting committee, and the recommendation of one of the guardians to employ a broken-down potboy whose antecedents he so well knew, was a proof, coupled with what I have above referred to, that it would be a mere waste of time to make any further communication to your board on the subject.

“At the early part of the year 1864, the late Mr Jeffreys moved that my salary should be increased. I waited upon him, and others who I knew were favourable to me, and urged them to get your board to provide medicines instead, as I wished to establish the principle that in such a large house as the Strand, all the drugs should be found at the cost of the ratepayers, thereby evincing that I had some other feeling in the matter save that of getting a little more money. Your board assented to the proposition tion, but limited my outlay on this head to £30 only in the year.” Finally, after recounting his efforts to have those abuses remedied, Dr Rogers’s testimony thus concludes: “I have regretted many times, and deeply, that these efforts, instead of receiving the cordial sympathies and assistance of (the guardians), have entailed upon me much annoyance, hostility, and undeserved insult.” Was it sensational, let us ask again, for an inspector from the Poor Law Board to conduct an inquiry into the malpractices of this shameful workhouse, as if he held a brief for the guardians; and to attempt to crush their medical officer as one of the troublesome fellows clamouring for reform? Passing to published records of the death of the wretched Timothy Daly, let us see what is sensational here. We all know that The dog, to gain his private ends, Went mad and bit the man and Mr Hardy would, doubtless, tell us that Daly died obstinately and sensationally for malicious purposes of his own, and with an eye to posthumous celebrity. This poor man was found at his lodgings, in want of the common necessaries of life; and though he frequently implored the parish doctor to procure him food and nutriment, the latter omitted to do so, on the supposition that Daly’s pride would be wounded at receiving them from parochial sources. He had nothing but a little milk and gruel for two or three days, and was so weakened when it was decided to take him to the workhouse, that stimulants were prescribed. It being nobody’s business to give them to him, he had, instead, an aperient, a sedative, and a syrup ; and arrived at the Holborn Union workhouse, well physicked, unfed, and half fainting from debility. Here, he had neither food nor medical advice until the next day, but was placed in a hot bath, because a pauper nurse thought him “by no means clean”; he became (not unnaturally) worse in the night, and his condition was pronounced dangerous when the doctor saw him some hours afterwards. Bed-sores supervened, and were not discovered by the doctor until that vague period, “three or four days,” had elapsed, so a pauper nurse bestrewed them with fullers’ earth, to the miserable pauper’s injury.

He was placed on a bed several inches too short for hi, and, after some weeks of anguish and neglect, the poor wretch had so strong a conviction that he was being killed by ill-treatment, that he preferred dying of starvation and disease outside, and had himself moved away.

Subsequently he was admitted to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he died the day after his admission, of “ exhaustion” arising from workhouse bed-sores and neglect.

The circumstances of this death were sensationally held to be a conclusive testimony to the uncertainty and irresponsibility attending the administration of our parochial system; and it was sensationally urged that, although Daly was completely within the circle of that system, he died for want of careful watching and suitable food.

Richard Gibson perished in St Giles’s workhouse, encrusted with corruption and filth, covered with vermin, and without proper nourishment or medical attendance. After protracted suffering, he was mercifully killed off with gin, surreptitiously administered by a drunken pauper nurse. The medical officer had passed the sick man’s bed, daily, without asking after his condition, or knowing how his disease progressed, or whether his bed-clothes were foul or clean; and a parochial coffin would have concealed Gibson’s sufferings and wrongs without boards, Bumbles, or the public, being the wiser, but for an audacious pauper named Magee, who wrote to the sitting magistrate at Bow-street, and so caused a “sensational “ inquiry, sensational reports, and a sensational shock of horror and indignation, wherever men and women — not belonging to the Poor Law Board — could read, and think, and feel.

Let us ask again what does Mr Gathorne Hardy mean by “sensational”? Is it sensational to tell the truth? Is it sensational to call public attention to a noteworthy example of a costly board existing under false pretences, and showing mankind how not to do it? Is it sensational to be poor, abject, wretched, dying? Is it sensational in a public officer, when he has nothing to say for his department, meanly to shelter himself under the miserable slang of the hour? Is the commonest humanity, the narrowest charity, sensational? What is Mr Hardy’s opinion of the New Testament? A sensational performance surely ! The good Samaritan ? A highly sensational character.

The twelve Apostles? What a sensational dozen ! Their Divine Master? Inconveniently and notably sensational! There was a time when men symbolically expressed their names in what was called a “rebus.” Perhaps the newest sensational effect is for a public servant to do this in a new way, and thus Mr Hardy sensationally exhibits himself as the most hardy man alive. The House of Commons may be all that Mr Disraeli says it is, or it may be the different thing that most other men know it to be ; but in either case it is surely remarkable that there is no man in it to put a notice on the paper “to ask the Right Honourable the Chief of the Bumbles for his definition of sensational”.